OBJECTIVE The Girls health Enrichment Multi-site Studies (GEMS), Phase 1, developed and pilot-tested interventions to prevent obesity in African-American preadolescent girls. This article describes the collaborative planning process undertaken to take full advantage of formative assessment activities for improving contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness. DESIGN Working group activit...

The Girls health Enrichment Multi-site Studies (GEMS) was a multi-center research program created for the purpose of testing interventions designed to prevent excess weight gain by African-American girls, as they enter and proceed through puberty. However, GEMS was not a "multi-center clinical trial" in the usual sense. Although these studies applied similar eligibility criteria, observed a sim...

The overall aim of the Global Enteric Multicenter Study-1 (GEMS-1) is to identify the etiologic agents associated with moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) among children <5 years of age, and thereby the attributable pathogen-specific population-based incidence of MSD, to guide investments in research and public health interventions against diarrheal disease. To accomplish this, 9 core assumptions...

This report summarizes and evaluates research from several laboratories that deals with the detection of ecological effects induced through exposure of microbes or plants to genetically engineered microorganisms (GEMs) and microbial pest control agents (MPCAs). Some 27 potential endpoints for measuring effects have been studied. Perturbations induced by GEMs have been detected in about one-half...

We investigate particle detector responses in some topologically non-trivial spacetimes. We extend a recently proposed regularization of the massless scalar field Wightman function in 4-dimensional Minkowski space to arbitrary dimension, to the massive scalar field, to quotients of Minkowski space under discrete isometry groups and to the massless Dirac field. We investigate in detail the trans...

We study the colors, structural properties, and star formation histories of a sample of ∼ 1600 dwarfs over look-back times of ∼ 3 Gyr (z = 0.002−0.25). The sample consists of 401 distant dwarfs drawn from the Galaxy Evolution from Morphologies and SEDs (GEMS) survey, which provides high resolution Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) images and accurate redshifts, and ...

Recently, second-life battery systems have received a growing interest as one of the most promising alternatives for decreasing the overall cost of the battery storage systems in stationary applications. The high-cost of batteries represents a prominent barrier for their use in traction and stationary applications. To make second-life batteries economically viable for stationary applications, a...

DDX1 bodies, cleavage bodies, Cajal bodies (CBs), and gems are nuclear suborganelles that contain factors involved in RNA transcription and/or processing. Although all four nuclear bodies can exist as distinct entities, they often colocalize or overlap with each other. To better understand the relationship between these four nuclear bodies, we examined their spatial distribution as a function o...

TAR DNA-binding protein-43 (TDP-43), a DNA/RNA-binding protein involved in RNA transcription and splicing, has been associated with the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, including ALS. However, the function of TDP-43 in motor neurons remains undefined. Here we use both gain- and loss-of-function approaches to determine roles of TDP-43 in motor neurons. Mice expressing human TDP-43 ...